Thing Explainer

Complicated things in simple words. From the bestselling author of "What If?" - the man who created xkcd and explained the laws of science with cartoons - comes a series of brilliantly simple diagrams that show how important things work: from the atomic bomb to the ballpoint pen.

It's good to know what the parts of an object are called, but it's much more interesting to know what they do. Richard Feynman once said that you don't really understand something unless you can explain it to a first-year student. In "Thing Explainer," Randall Munroe takes a quantum leap beyond that: he explains things using only drawings and a vocabulary of just 1,000 of the most common words.

Many of the things we use every day - like our food-heating radio boxes, our very tall roads, and our computer rooms - are foreign to us. This also applies to the other worlds around our sun, the large flat rocks we live on, and even to what is inside us. Where do these things come from? How do they work? What do they look like when you open them? And what would happen if we heat them, cool them down, point them in a different direction, or press this button?

In "Thing Explainer," Munroe provides us with answers to these questions and many, many more. Funny, interesting, and always understandable, this book is for everyone - from ages 5 to 105 - who has ever wondered how things work and why.